CouponCloud is Attempting to Disrupt a “Broken” Coupon Industry

June 14, 2014

12:00 pm

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I doubt that most of you reading this are extreme couponers. I know this because if you were, you wouldn’t have time to read this because you’d be too busy couponing…extremely. That being said, I’m sure many of you appreciate the occasional deal brought to you by a manufacturer’s coupon. You might not be aware (or care, frankly) about the million steps involved in processing the 315 billion coupons issued annually. But perhaps you’d start caring if the disruption of this process benefited you, the consumer.

Kansas City based CouponCloud is attempting to revolutionize the fourteen-billion-dollar paper coupon processing industry by skipping the clearing houses (many of which are in Mexico) where coupons are sent after redemption and allowing retailers to process coupons at the point of sale. Retailers currently have to wait sometimes up to three months to receive their reimbursements on coupons used at their stores.

“Hundreds of millions of dollars are lost to fraud. Profits are reduced from processing expenses. Market data, reimbursements, and decisions are delayed by shipments and audits.”

When you use a manufacturer’s coupon, it is first shipped back to the manufacturer where it is sorted and then sent to the clearing house for auditing and reprocessing. This takes a lot of time, money, and manpower. The CouponCloud platform aims to make this process much more efficient with instant coupon validation and real-time transfer of funds from the manufacturer to the retailer. This could save retailers $.50 on every dollar they’re trying to redeem in coupons.

The platform would be free for retailers and only cost $.06 per transaction for manufacturers. Additionally, it will help digital coupon distributors such as redplum and RetailMeNot more efficiently spread coupon love to the consumer.

Several added benefits of their secure platform include eliminating the over one billion dollars of coupon fraud that is absorbed by the industry every year, and helping coupons become largely paperless…an environmental impact that cannot be overlooked.

Founders Matthew Simrell and Adam Coomes bring many years of entrepreneurship and business experience to CouponCloud. Simrell has been starting companies, in a variety of areas, since the age of 10. Coomes has founded several tech startups and was listed as one of America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs in Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek in 2010.

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Kristin is an aspiring entrepreneur who is enthusiastically navigating her way through the DC startup space. She has an unending passion for learning and is never satisfied with the status quo. During the day she is an ops, biz dev, and marketing maven for Fission Strategy